Just another WordPress.com site

Меню

Архив за месяц: Январь 2013

Happy Birthday to one of my favorite writers, Jack London! Last summer, leaving the Bay Area, heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge on Highway 101, I saw an exit for Napa Valley and took a last second detour. Pulling over to consult my Adventure Atlas, I noticed I was near the Valley of the Moon, home of Jack London’s Beauty Ranch, now open to the public.

When I was young, my friend Jessie’s dad published a biography about Jack London. Somehow, I thought that meant Mr. Claflin knew Jack London, whom I revered from his Alaskan dog stories Call of the Wild and White Fang. I remember being struck when I learned that Jack was dead, and had been dead for some time.

Jack London was only 40 when he went to sleep on the oak-shaded porch at his cottage and never awoke, a victim of kidney…

Lots of you have been asking about website verification for Pinterest — the process that tells Pinterest that you own the website listed in your profile. Once your site is verified, your blog’s URL appears on your profile and in search results alongside the nifty little «Verified!» checkmark.

We’ve now added Pinterest to the list of webmaster tools we support. Verifying your blog with Pinterest is as easy as cutting and pasting a single line of code and hitting «save.»

(There I am, all verified. Don’t I look like a power user?)

If the idea of having to deal with code makes your nervous, don’t worry; our simple instructions tell you exactly what to put where. In less than a minute, you can have a checkmark of your very own, letting your followers know that you’re a trusted source of finding awesome stuff on the internet.

This past summer my dad and I made a pilgrimage to one of the most famous fossil localities in the world: British Columbia’s Burgess Shale. My Travels in Geology feature story for EARTH magazine appears in the January issue:

Of all the famous fossil localities in the world — Mongolia’s Flaming Cliffs, Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, Wyoming’s Green River, Germany’s Solnhöfn Quarry — perhaps none is as widely celebrated as British Columbia’s Burgess Shale. High in the Canadian Rockies, the Burgess Shale contains some of the oldest and most exquisitely detailed fossils of early life on Earth. Visiting the Burgess Shale requires some preparation — you must hire a guide and hike 22 kilometers at high elevation — but for a fossil enthusiast, the payoff is worth every step.

As a general rule, the fossil record is dominated by hard parts: shells, teeth and bones. The Burgess fossils, however, reveal so…